Michael Bay = All Explosions, No Brains & Plausibility

Rating: 4/10 (23 August 2014)

Wow... what potential that turned out to be a stinker. The only thing saving this watchable disaster is the fantastic cast and high budget visuals. The stilted and illogical dialogue and incredibly dumb screenplay cannot save this from being a totally forgettable sci fi thriller.
The movie starts out promising. Sean Bean is a great actor playing a doctor running a strange facility that raises human beings, training them one day for their release into an uncontaminated Island. McGregor is the curious lead who meets Johansson. Security is laughably lax in this ultra high tech facility, so bad that nobody even notices that McGregor leaves a floor tile blatantly out of place when he sneaks around. How dumb can everyone be?
Buscemi plays a completely out of place supervisor. He's got material to fuel McGregor's curiosity that should never even be in the facility. It makes no sense whatsoever. But it's there to unnecessarily further curiosity of our lead.
Hounsou is wasted as... I can't tel you. But he sounds like he's reading from a cue card. The dialogue is do awkward and dumb he seems to not believe it himself. Obvious questions are never asked. Obvious next steps are never explored. This is a Michael Bay film. "Guys.... I need to get from the explosion scene to the car chase and then to the next action sequence. " That's what this "intelligent" scifi film devolves into, making it the totally forgettable movie that it is.
Don't make the mistake of thinking this film is smart. It has a great premise but the Michael Bay execution sucks and is "Transformers" does Bladerunner = disaster. If you want totally mindless eye candy with HUGE plot holes (and I mean HUGE), then watch this forgettable film on a cable rerun. That's about the extent of it.